Possible Progress In The Gulf, In Spite Of The Federal Government

The Wall Street Journal reports that tests are being run on a giant oil skimmer,  a tanker retrofitted by it Japanese owners.

Now, compare and contrast.

This is the entrepreneurial approach:

The day the Deepwater Horizon exploded, TMT CEO Nobu Su ordered the A Whale, a brand-new $160 million cargo hauler, to start sailing west from China, while he commissioned Hyundai engineers to devise a plan to covert it into a skimmer. The plans were worked out by the time the ship made it to a Portugal shipyard, where it was modified.

After water is ingested through the ship's vents, it is pumped into a series of containers, where oil rises to the top of the water over several days. The oil is then siphoned into a separate container, before being transferred to a tanker. In Portugal, the ship tested its intake process on water sprayed with fire foam, since using oil was out of the question. It proved effective, the company said. TNT has two more ships, B Whale and C Whale, that are in the process of being turned into skimming vessels.

This, on the other hand, is the Obama Federal Government approach:

EPA guidelines require that the discharged water contain no more than 15 parts per million of oil—a difficult standard to meet, said Prof. Overton. The federal on-scene coordinator can exempt the discharge from the Clean Water Act standard.

In other words, the EPA has decided it would rather let 50k barrels of oil per day not be cleaned up, rather than have equipment in place that cleans up, say ninety percent of the problem. Does this make sense to any sane person that actually wants the problem solved?

But wait, there's more!

One deterrent to getting more skimmers to the Gulf is a federal requirement under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 that both the U.S. Navy and state jurisdictions around the country had to have a certain number of skimmers on hand in the event of an oil spill.

Earlier this week, the Coast Guard and EPA issued a temporary rule relaxing the federal skimmer requirements through December, freeing up the number of skimmers available to be used in the Gulf. But some politicians still decried how long it took to get the change approved.

"The president and his administration need to be moving heaven and Earth to get those ships there tomorrow," Sen. George LeMieux (R., Fla.) said in an interview Friday. "In fact, they should have been there 50 days ago."

In other words, we've got lots of equipment on hand, but we're not going to use it, and we're not going to consider using obvious common sense. Let's fight a three-alarm blaze with a garden hose only--that pumper truck in the firehouse might be needed for fire hydrant maintenance and local parades.

Only two conclusions can be drawn: Either this Administration is completely inept, or...they don't want a solution, because they want to use this tragedy as a means to seize more power. Given the anecdotes of recent encounters between Obama and senators Kyl and Lamar Alexander, OldSouth suspects the latter scenario.

He truly, sincerely hopes he is mistaken.